Theatre review: Marjorie Prime evokes the isolation of our recent times
Actor Gai Brown stands out as an aging widow in Ensemble Theatre Company’s rendition of Jordan Harrison’s play
Gai Brown (seated) and Bronwen Smith in Ensemble Theatre Company’s Marjorie Prime. Photo by Emily Cooper
Ensemble Theatre Company presents Marjorie Prime to July 1 at Waterfront Theatre as part of its Summer Repertory Festival.
There’s a scene in Ensemble Theatre Company’s production of Marjorie Prime of such quiet beauty it’ll break your heart. The titular character, played by Gai Brown, is an 85-year-old widow whose memory is failing as dementia takes hold. She has gone to live with her daughter, Tess (Bronwen Smith), and son-in-law, Jon (Tariq Leslie). When Jon puts Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on the stereo for her to listen to while he steps out, Marjorie is transported to her younger days, working as a professional musician, and mimics playing the composition on violin; as the lighting closes in on her at the front of the stage, she pretends to pluck the strings, recalling the pizzicato of “Winter”, a sense of serenity washing over her smiling face. Brown delivers such a delicate moment that you can feel the comfort that the music delivers right to her very core in yours. Elsewhere, with her vanity and stubbornness, you can see why she often drives her grown daughter nuts.
To help Marjorie cope with grief, loneliness, and a memory that keeps playing tricks on her, Jon has convinced Tess to get Marjorie a “Prime”: a computerized version of her late husband; the matriarch asks for the AI form to embody Walter as his 30-year-old self. Walter (Carlen Escarraga) is fed information about her life, which he relays back to her, sometimes embellishing stories, at her request, to make them more romantic or appealing. He keeps her company when she doesn’t want to be alone; he can banter with her and bring back certain memories, but he doesn’t have all the answers for her.
In Ensemble’s telling of the story, originally written by Jordan Harrison, director Shelby Bushell puts as much focus on Marjorie’s relationship with Walter Prime as on her difficult relationship with Tess. In navigating her mother’s cognitive decline, Tess mines the depths of her own trauma.
While there’s no logic with dementia, it’s perplexing that the script—a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama—or at least this interpretation of it calls for Marjorie’s loved ones, on more than one occasion, to point out to her that she never forgot about her late son Damien, who died in his youth. Given that Marjorie has so many moments of lucidity, it seems implausible that this would be so striking to those around her.
Still, even as the play deals with scars that never heal, its theme of isolation makes Ensemble’s choice for 2022 especially apt given what we’ve all just come out of, our two long years of social distancing not necessarily a faded memory for everyone quite yet.
The performances by Brown and Smith are especially compelling. Brown has the elderly woman’s mannerisms and emotions down to a T, from the way she plops down into an armchair, her body stiff, to the shame she conveys when her physical functioning betrays her. Smith’s Tess is distanced, vulnerable, and caring, a mom with three kids of her own who feels she did everything right but still didn’t get the life she once hoped for. Leslie and Escarraga have less to work with; as a digital being, even-keeled Walter isn’t expected to convey feelings; Jon hits his breaking point near the play’s very end, Leslie conveying the character’s brokenness.
With more than one Prime ultimately appearing in the story, Marjorie Prime underlines a widespread pandemic realization that hit the arts world especially hard: no matter how much we love and need technology, it’s never the same as being in the same room as other living, breathing human beings.
Related Articles
